‘You don’t know that,’ said Cade, unsure what he was even saying. ‘Just breathe, Abi. Like this.’
She ignored him and her torch expired in the dirt beside them, the darkness now barely held at bay by Cade’s own sputtering light.
‘All this,’ she snarled. ‘This is all because of me. This is my fault. Mine. Mine!’ She repeated the word over and over, pounding at her skull. He went to stop her, but she shoved him away. ‘They can have me,’ she moaned. ‘They deserve me. For what I’ve done.’
‘You don’t mean that, Abi.’
‘I’m nothing, Cade,’ she said. ‘Nothing worth saving.’
‘They would have hanged you if you stayed, Abi. What choice did they give you? Kick a bear up the arse and you can’t blame it for biting you.’
‘I should have listened. Should have done as I was told.’
‘How can you do as you’re told when you were born with a brain the size of yours? Wanting the truth is not a crime, Abi. It’s who you are.’
He winced. The pain in his skull was returning, drowning that strange echo in his brain. Perhaps the Nothings could hear that echo too. Perhaps it was leading them straight to him, like wolves tracking the scent of wounded prey. He tried to shut out the discomfort, push it back, and as he did so, felt the passageway throb like a living thing. The pulse tightened his skull until he cried out.
‘Cade?’
‘Abi,’ he whispered, fighting back a mounting nausea. ‘When I crossed the boundary, I felt something. I felt it again when the stones collapsed. It was like a bell ringing inside my head. It left me feeling like I was seeing things clearly for the first time in my life.’
Abi’s look of fear was melting into one of astonishment.
‘You felt it too?’ she said.
Cade strained to see into the gloom behind her. The pain in his skull narrowed to an audible whine. No distant footsteps echoed towards them. Nothing breathed. And yet it seemed to Cade as though that very absence was itself a kind of presence, a blackness that seethed with vitality. He remembered how his eyes had refused to behold those terrible figures as they crossed the ruined boundary. Now he wondered if his ears might similarly refuse to detect their approach. If the Nothings could not be seen, perhaps they could not be heard.
The very thought of it made his brain boil, as if something were mauling it, trying to wrest the organ from his skull.
‘I can feel them coming, Abi,’ he groaned.
‘No,’ she said, her voice thick, slurred with dread and pain. ‘They’re already here.’
She snatched Cade’s torch and bolted down the passage, pulling Cade after her.
They tumbled into a huge antechamber where a pair of immense iron gates confronted them. The torch cast its dwindling glow upon a monstrous lock clamped above their heads. Cade could see a sliver of familiar green luminescence at the apex of the door-frame.
Abi thrust the torch into his hands as she reached to examine the lock. The velvet gloom seemed to tighten around him, absorbing everything in the room but the locked gates standing before them. Cade could sense it again, the emptiness a living thing closing in on him, trapping his heart until he could feel it fidget like a rabbit in his chest. There was nothing there, nothing visible, nothing tangible. But it was there, a wound in reality, bleeding darkness into the world. Abi cursed and snatched Cade’s knife from his belt, though the lock appeared devoid of any keyhole.
He was being hunted by servants of a god. Things of the night, of fairy tale. Nightmares come to life. He was but human, as helpless as the deer he had once hunted in the Cradle, preyed upon by beings of a cunning unfathomable to his primitive instincts. The Nothings’ victory was inevitable. What hope had he? His eyes darted about him. Darkness everywhere. Distance was no obstacle to such as the Nothings, Cade now felt sure. They could be watching from a mile away. Or perhaps they waited in this very room. He imagined faces fishbelly-pale, blackened grins lined with a thousand crooked teeth, eyes smiling as they savoured the thunder of his heart, waiting for the darkness to drown him.
He yelped, dropping the torch as its dying flame nipped his hand.
His world went black and blindness sent him mad. Goaded by fearful imaginings, he became a caged animal battering at the iron gates. Terror strengthened his onslaught, but the barrier barely trembled.
He felt Abi pulling him back, trying to calm him. His elbow struck her face, but he was beyond caring. Nothing mattered but tearing his way through this metal wall and escaping that which hunted him in the dark. He scrabbled at the rough metal, tearing fingernails, wetting his hands with blood. The knot in his belly tightened to breaking point as the darkness deepened.
A flash of white suddenly drove it all away, blinding him again. He stumbled back, a flickering light now illuminating the chamber from its rubble-strewn floor to its high, vaulted ceiling. Abi stood nearby, blood streaming from her nose, shielding her eyes as she stared at him. It took two more heartbeats before he realised.
Each of his hands was enveloped in a dazzling bouquet of lightning.
Cade yelled in alarm, casting his arms about him, trying to fling away the crackling light that swarmed about his fingers.
Abi’s face flashed in the dark, eyes wide with anguish. ‘Cade, calm down!’
Her voice steadied him a moment, and he held his shaking hands before him, long enough to realise the lightning didn’t burn. It merely prickled his hands, fizzing like blood returning to a numbed limb. Impossible.
‘Steady, Cade,’ said Abi. ‘I think I know what’s happening.’
She was laughing. Why was she laughing? Cade didn’t want to know. He wanted no more of this terrible new world. He wanted it gone. He wanted blue skies and familiar green. The maelstrom in his hands intensified, seeming to feed upon his distress. He couldn’t breathe. He wanted to be gone from this place. He brought his hands together, gathering the coruscation, then hurled it away with a cry of rage.
The blast of lightning struck the gates, shattering the ancient lock as it shoved the doors aside with a groan that shook the chamber. Behind them stood a crumbling wall of roots wallowing in blessed emerald moonlight.
Cade fell whimpering into Abi’s arms, his hands smoking and shaking as the archway’s lintel sagged high above, dribbling dust. She pulled him through the rain of crumbling dirt. The debris rattled on the floor behind them as they clambered up the screen of roots. Cade heard the lintel come free with a momentous gasp. A torrent of earth and stone followed after it. The deluge thundered to the ground, shaking the wall of roots to which he clung, deafening him. Choked by the uproar of dirt and blinding dust, he climbed on, spurred by the sight of the pale green moon peering through an aperture in the earthen ceiling.
Cade clawed his way up through the soil, pulling clods of turf down upon Abi as he fought his way through the hole, hungry for the air of the outside world. She struggled up after him, tearing the rags of her skirts as she hauled herself through the gap. Cade glanced back through the hole at the mounting wall of collapsed rock and earth.
Nothing could get through that, he told himself. Nothing.
An enormous oak whispered above him. He pulled himself out from between its roots and fell onto a grassy slope, gasping in the fresh night air. The mountains of the Cradle rose behind him. Before him lay the Lands Beyond.
Cade knelt on a grassy shore before an ocean of corn, deep enough to drown in. The shaggy stalks stood taller than any crop that grew in the Cradle, their stiff leaves clacking in the night breeze. The rows combed the land all the way to distant hills patched with farmland. And beyond them one would find cottages, towns, even cities, all populated by strangers who knew nothing of life within the Cradle. He was no longer looking down upon this world as if studying a map. He was now part of it, thrillingly vulnerable to all it might contain. Yet his wonder soured as his reason returned. He shuddered to think of Abi seeing him so unmanned before those awful gates. He felt suddenly naked, piteous in his terror. Throne forgive him, he had even struck her. He clutched the ground with his wounded fingers, welcoming the pain.
Abi stood in silence nearby. As he struggled for words, Cade felt subtle currents shift in the air. Light flickered nearby. He turned to see threads of lightning squirming over Abi’s knuckles. As she watched the little bolts play about her fingers, Cade recognised her look of awe. He had seen it before when she had stood by the boundary stone and surveyed the Lands Beyond for the first time. The lightning vanished obediently as she closed her hand.
She looked up at him, grinning despite her bloody nose.
‘I was right,’ she said, delighted. ‘This is what they were keeping from us for all these years. The boundary stones, Cade. They cast a pall to hide us from those that would hunt us, as I said. But they did so by cloaking our abilities, by cutting us off from whatever sphere we derive these powers. But now that spell is broken. The veil has been lifted from our eyes. Now those energies could be ours to command.’
